Nia Davies - Böcker

Bodies. Rhythms. Motion. Sounds. All Fours is a debut collection of poetry from Nia Davies, a book of rituals in language that stalk the space between what is uttered and what is meant. These poems are haunted by the strange traces of the longest words in the world and folk-mythic figures such as Sinbad, Eurydice, Mossy Coat, Pan and Baba Yaga. They pose riddles with multiple or mysterious answers. A swerving sweary jump into a terrain that is both comically musical and perplexedly political, All Fours speaks of the (mis)adventures of sex and human communication, a life full-to-bursting with burning questions.All fours was longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards).

In Votive Mess Nia Davies asks how time and desire move us errantly. Her second collection follows her startling debut All fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment. These works are studies in the altered states of travel, masks, comedy, learning and love. Nia Davies begins to learn a lost mother tongue, iaith Cymraeg, and presents unfinished experiments in liminality.Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel. There are love letters drowsy and excessive as well as uncanny happenings on stage and in the woods.Votive Mess is composed out of a tangle of sex, leaf, stumbles on stage, damage, blackberries and dyslexia. There is a discharge of Awen, otherwise known as poesis. The navel of the dream is inside out.Nia Davies' first full-length collection, All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.